• The Times reports that a half dozen militants, including a couple of suicide bombers, raided the compound of an American contractor in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz at 3 a.m., killing at least four people. Those militants who didn’t blow themselves up were killed in a subsequent, six-hour long firefight. The Taliban took credit for the attack. [NY Times]

• Boorish Girls Gone Wild magnate Joe Francis is tying the knot with CBS News entertainment reporter Christina McLarty. The most surprising part of this announcement to us is not that the notorious cad and ex-convict is settling down, but that Quincy Jones will be his best man. [Page Six]

• An Australian Catholic priest was sentenced to 20 years in jail for molesting 25 children over the course of two decades. The cleric, John SIdney Denham, apologized to the victims and called himself a “mere scumbag pedophile.”

• NASA has developed a new flying telescope capable of recording the birth of distant stars and plants. The device, weighing in at 17 tons, is built into a 747 called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. The plane’s elevated position, above most of the moisture in the atmosphere, allows the telescope to attain a crisper resolution. [NPR]

• The unemployment rate dropped to 9.5 percent, its lowest level since July 2009, but largely because a large number of people have given up on finding new employment. Meanwhile, the economy shed 125,000 jobs, many of them as a result of temporary census jobs’ coming to an end. [Associated Press]

• British actor Andrew Garfield is set to play Peter Parker/Spider-Man in a reboot of the superhero franchise, the first installment of which came out only eight years ago. [Hollywood Reporter]